1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to solution ordering processes, and more particularly to methods and systems for processing solution orders by federating existing disparate order and contract management systems by creating and utilizing dynamic solution records.
2. Description of the Related Art
Integrated customer solutions spending is estimated to comprise more than 60% of the overall information technology (IT) market, and is growing at about 9% annually; however, current supply chain systems are not designed to support the ordering, fulfillment and delivery of integrated solutions. In general, customer solutions can be described as a customized combination of products, assets, and services. In many cases, the customer solutions and their designs are fairly unique. Today solutions are ordered, fulfilled, and delivered as piece parts. As a consequence, there is very little reuse of proven patterns and customized solutions because there are a lack of market data analytics that describe the systems, software, hardware, assets or services being sold together.
In addition, different versions and modifications of a solution are difficult to manage. There is no tooling to manage solution lifecycles or the components that comprise them. Even when software applications, hardware, or executable logic are listed based upon function and dependencies, a software vendor (SV) or system integrator (SI) still has to manually select the individual parts or components to assemble a solution for a business or infrastructure problem. Consequently, solution creation and assembly occurs on a micro-level. There is no utilization of specific solutions for business or infrastructure problems that have been previously tested and/or successfully deployed in a customer environment on a macro-level. Without a data structure to support such tested and/or successfully deployed solutions, guided selling, licensing, cross-brand configuration, consolidated orders and consolidated invoices are not feasible.
More importantly, there is no comprehensive order fulfillment system for solutions. Current disparate legacy order management systems each process its respective order fulfillment independently and without regard for how its fellow disparate legacy order management systems fulfill their orders. For example, software fulfillment, hardware fulfillment and services fulfillment will each have their own order configurator and order management functions, as well as process that order independently of the others. In addition, multiple people with access to multiple systems are required to view data across disparate order management systems. No single user has access to all the systems in which the data is spread. As such, order status is available online for all orders, e.g., all brands; however, for a user to obtain the order status for a given solution, which may include hundreds of order numbers, each individual order number must be known for the solution components and separate queries must be created.
Another issue with the disparate legacy order management systems is the large amount of time required for the coordination of solution delivery. This large amount of time required for solution delivery coordination is primarily due to the dynamic and inter-related schedule status changes that occur, as well as the manual coordination required across a fairly large team of individuals in order to support an integrated solution delivery to the customer.